Sunday, March 11, 2012

The Week That Was and Weekend Wrap-Up

We've done a great deal of reading this weekend. Even the weather forecasts have been bad for Spring Breakers this week. The Republican nomination has not been finalized. Barack Hussein Obama, the campaigning president, is still out on the trail, and Washington D.C. is still in the hands of incompetent partisan legislators. Our country is in a real quandary. Our unemployment is still exorbitantly high, gas prices are rising, the housing market has not improved, folks worry constantly about the instability of the future of health care...in short, nothing has changed for the better.

Politicians are crisscrossing the country making promises they can't possibly keep. We worry about Obama's apologies to the very Muslims who sneakily attacked us on our soil on September 11, 2001. GOP voters seem as divided as ever and it will take divine intervention or a great love of country to unite them all against Obama.

We read insatiably searching for answers, seeking a glimmer of hope, but so far, what we read only adds to our worries. We don't like sounding pessimistic, but fear for our nation's future is overwhelming. We offer no answers, we do not pretend to have solutions, we'd like for you to read these selections and give us your opinion. If you are a member of Facebook,Two Sisters From The Right has a page by the same name and we welcome your input.Two Sisters From The Right.

A U.S. soldier was taken into custody in southern Afghanistan on Sunday, a few hours after he opened fire on Afghan civilians, killing 15, U.S. and Afghan officials said.

The shooting took place at approximately 3 a.m. as a lone soldier left a checkpoint in Kandahar province’s Panjwai district and opened fire on civilians in two villages, said Javed Faisal, the director of the provincial government’s media center.

Citing preliminary reports, Faisal said at least 15 people were killed and five were wounded. Provincial authorities said they were awaiting news from an investigative team sent to the villages before releasing a definitive death toll. READ MORE

My analysis is that most faith based systems depend upon an absolute moral order. The declaration of things as absolutely evil or absolutely good, as sin or virtue, puts liberalism into a horrible position because it’s founded on no judgment on anything. As a result, any faith that is seriously practiced or understood is a challenge to the politics that depend on constituencies that would rather not be told that their choices are bad and their lives are not virtuous. — Hugh Hewitt

Most liberals in this country tend to treat Christians one of two ways: either with open, sniggering contempt or if they think they need their votes, they tend to switch over to hamhanded and grotesque pandering. That’s not to say that there aren’t liberal Christians, there are plenty of them, but they’ve just become accustomed to being treated by their fellow liberals like the sort of refuse you scrape off your shoes after a long walk through a cow pasture. — John Hawkins

Liberalism is so unrelentingly hostile to Christianity that it's virtually impossible to be both a devout Christian and a devout liberal at the same time. To be a liberal Christian means you either have to completely gut your religious beliefs to make them compatible with your political inclinations or alternately, you have to spend your days cowering with your eyes down while your fellow liberals demean, smear, and mock everything you should hold dear. READ MORE

Rep. Walter B. Jones Jr., R-N.C., has introduced a resolution declaring that should the president use offensive military force without authorization of an act of Congress, “it is the sense of Congress” that such an act would be “an impeachable high crime and misdemeanor.

Specifically, Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution reserves for Congress alone the power to declare war, a restriction that has been sorely tested in recent years, including Obama’s authorization of military force in Libya.

“This week it was Secretary of Defense Panetta’s declaration before the Senate Armed Services Committee that he and President Obama look not to the Congress for authorization to bomb Syria but to NATO and the United Nations,” Tancredo writes. “This led to Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., introducing an official resolution calling for impeachment should Obama take offensive action based on Panetta’s policy statement, because it would violate the Constitution.” READ MORE

Every time trouble has erupted in Iran against the regime—1999, 2003, and, most recently, 2009—university students have been at the forefront of protests. This is partly why Iran’s current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has been battling over control of Iran’s biggest institution of higher learning for the last three years.

Established in 1983, the Islamic Free University (a.k.a. Azad University) has become the largest center of higher education in the land. With 400 branches across the nation and abroad (including Dubai and Oxford), and 1.5 million students enrolled, Azad is a powerhouse. Relying on donations and tuition fees rather than government funding, Azad has accumulated over $20 billion worth of assets over the years. And since its early days it has been firmly in the hands of Iran’s most astute politician – Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

As I previously reported in these pages (“A Ph.D. in Torture”), Ahmadinejad sought to snatch control of the university from Rafsanjani under the pretext that the university sided with the reformists in the 2009 presidential elections. In March 2010, Ahmadinejad won his first victory when he managed to get the university’s status changed by limiting a chancellor’s tenure to two four-year terms, which would force out conservative politician and Rafsanjani proxy, Abdollah Jasbi, who had been serving almost thirty years. Rafsanjani tried to outmaneuver Ahmadinejad by transforming the university into a religious endowment in order to shield Azad from state interference, but Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, intervened to block this move. Eventually, Jasbi was forced out in January 2012. READ MORE

It takes a British newspaper, the Daily Mail, to publicize a study with tremendous political implications:

White Americans feel they are more discriminated against than blacks, a new study reveals. Sociologists from Harvard and Tufts universities asked 208 white and 209 black men and women to rate 'racism' against both ethnic groups since the 1950s on a scale of one to ten.

The results showed that while both blacks and whites saw anti-black racism decreasing over the decades, whites saw race relations as a 'zero sum game' where they were losing out as blacks gained the advantage.

The results, published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, showed that on average blacks saw anti-white bias rising slightly from 1.4 in the 1950s to 1.8 today.READ MORE

1. Ron Paul won the popular vote in his first primary or caucus -- the Virgin Islands -- but Mitt Romney still ended up walking away with most of the delegates. Dave Weigel explains.

2. That was pretty much the theme of the weekend. Rick Santorumwonthe Kansas Republican caucuses easily. But Romney did just well enough to keep the state from being winner-take-all for Santorum, nabbing seven delegates, and then pulling in delegates from Guam, the Virgin Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands. Romney also prevailed in this weekend's voting in the seemingly never-ending Wyoming caucuses. Romney got the most delegates this weekend, 39-33, extending his lead.

3. The mathessentially favors Romney at this point, but because the counts are inexact -- a lot of unbound delegates still out there, plus caucuses where the delegate allocation has a confusing relationship with the popular vote totals -- it isn't clear how much so. Tim Carney lays out the realistic best-case scenario for Romney, Sean Trende the worst case. Either way, Santorum and Newt Gingrich stand a much better chance of denying Romney a majority than overtaking him.

4. Gingrich stands a chance of winning Alabama and Mississippi on Tuesday. If he doesn't? Initially, it seemed he would consider dropping out, but now he is insisting that he won't. Obviously, how well he does and where he places will be important. But a Southern strategy can't just consist of South Carolina and Georgia.

5. Rasmussen shows both Romney and Santorum winning national pluralities against President Barack Obama.

MICHAEL RAMIREZ POLITICAL CARTOON OF THE WEEK

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The President proclaimed, "Oil is the energy of the past." The truth is, oil is the energy of the present. Our economy depends on it. The media and the White House have constructed a juvenile argument that if you support short term self-sufficiency through domestic drilling, you are automatically opposed to renewable energy or green energy research. Obama reinforces this argument with false constructions and half-truths. America currently produces 2% of the world's oil but only because U.S. policy currently restricts the development of oil on federal land. The Institute for Energy Research has stated there is enough recoverable oil within our borders to fuel America for 250 years. We may use 20% of the global oil but we produce 25% of the world's energy, we use it more efficiently than the rest of the world and our economy is responsible for about 25% percent of the world's GDP. - Michael Ramirez -Facebook